Published: Sunday, February 17, 2013 at 6:30 a.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, February 16, 2013 at 9:06 p.m.

Four years ago today, President Barack Obama scored one of his biggest policy victories, enacting the federal economic stimulus program that he had touted widely during his first campaign.

Facts

STIMULUS MONEY

Largest stimulus awards in Marion County:

$53 MILLION

Marion County School Board

$27 MILLION

Florida Department of Transportation

$19.1 MILLION

Marion County (incl. Sheriff's Office)

$9.2 MILLION

City of Ocala (incl. Ocala Police and Housing Authority)

$8.5 MILLION

Workforce Connection

$6.6 MILLION

Childhood Development Services

$5.9 MILLION

Project Health

$4.6 MILLION

Atheros Communications

$3.4 MILLION

College of Central Florida

$3.3 MILLION

City of Dunnellon

$3.1 MILLION

Early Learning Coalition

$2.4 MILLION

Kids Central

$1.7 MILLION

Heart of Florida clinic

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act promised to create or preserve 3.5 million jobs — 206,000 of them in Florida — during its first two years through a combination of tax breaks, government contracts and loans and direct entitlement payments.

Four years on, the $840 billion stimulus package remains very much with us.

Not all of the awarded money, either nationally or locally, has been spent, according to federal officials, and the recipients are still telling Washington how the funding is being utilized. The most recent report updates were recorded on Jan. 31.

Yet looking back over the past four years, at least within Marion County, it appears the stimulus program offered a mixed bag of economic success and perhaps didn't work quite the way people might have imagined.

The unemployment picture improved as the recovery act, or ARRA, money flowed in, but the program saved or created hundreds of jobs that were primarily in government, which taxpayers will be responsible for after the stimulus money is gone. And the private-sector jobs that did materialize over the past four years are now drying up along with the funding.

■ ■ ■

Given the gravity of the economic crisis at the time, and calls for funding “shovel-ready” projects, many likened Obama's program to the wide-scale public works efforts that President Franklin Roosevelt launched to combat the Great Depression.

That image was helped along by the administration itself.

Reporting on the progress of the recovery act on its first anniversary in February 2010, Vice President Joe Biden observed, “Jobs have been created thanks to tens of thousands of projects now under way nationwide. And the groundwork for the economy of the next century is being put in place as we invest in high speed rail, health technology, broadband, a smarter electrical grid, clean cars and batteries and renewable energy.”

Much of the $152.6 million that the ARRA poured into Marion County through grants and contracts went for such needs, according to recovery.gov, the government's official website that tracks stimulus spending.

State environmental regulators even dug an underpass along County Road 475 to help equestrians, hikers and animals navigate the Marjorie Harris Carr Cross Florida Greenway.

The biggest local award — $27 million — went to the Florida Department of Transportation to four-lane nearly six miles of Baseline Road.

In all, at least $55 million of federal stimulus spending within Marion County went for infrastructure needs, a Star-Banner analysis of the recovery.gov data revealed.

The bulk of that money went for road projects, arriving mostly in 2009 and 2010 as scrambling local road builders were significantly cutting prices to find a job and laying people off if they couldn't.

“It drastically accelerated those projects” Greg Slay, executive director of the Ocala-Marion County Transportation Organization, said of the nearly two dozen projects that took off with stimulus funds.

“We did a good job putting together a list of projects so when (the Department of Transportation) called, we could hand them a stack of projects. There are definitely projects that to this day probably still wouldn't be done” were it not for that money.

But therein lies the conundrum of much of the stimulus spending.

Topping the list of the Obama administration's talking points from February 2009 was the argument that 90 percent of the projected 3.5 million jobs nationwide would be created in the private sector.

Undoubtedly, the ARRA money breathed life into local government projects that might have been delayed for a considerable amount of time, if they got done at all, as the recession deepened and public budgets were pared.

In turn, dozens of construction workers found work — albeit temporary, since those projects are now mostly completed.

But it was government agencies and nonprofits that posted many of the employment gains.

■ ■ ■

Under the ARRA, a “job” is not necessarily a job, as commonly understood.

Federal guidelines told recipients to calculate the employment generated by the money according to a formula documenting the “full-time equivalent,” or FTE, of a job.

The totals were reported quarterly and based on workers amassing 520 hours in a three-month span. Thus, as federal auditors saw it, one FTE was created whether one worker put in that much time over three months or 10 workers posted 52 hours each.

In the summer of 2010, for example, when the city of Ocala made street improvements downtown at Broadway Street and Southwest First Avenue, the contractor reported using 123 people on the project, recovery.gov records indicate.

Collectively those people worked 5,772 hours. Under the government's formula, that equated to about 11 “jobs.”

Typically, according to the reports, the jobs total rises slowly, peaks and then tapers off.

Ed Pound, spokesman for the federal board that oversees the stimulus projects, described the jobs numbers, although self-reported by recipients or contractors, as “high quality.” He added that measures were taken to ensure they were not fudged.

Using the numbers reported at the peak of those projects, the $55 million devoted to infrastructure needs created about 275 jobs.

In comparison, an equivalent amount of money helped preserve and spawn nearly four times that many jobs in education.

Marion County Public Schools officials say the Obama administration's plan saved 884 jobs and created 130 others, new hires primarily made to comply with recent state and federal education requirements.

School district spokesman Kevin Christian said the $54 million in ARRA funding reduced by half the $104 million budget cut the district was prepared to make.

Without that, the district — the single biggest recipient of ARRA funding in Marion County — would have eliminated jobs primarily for teachers' support personnel who play an integral part in implementing the curriculum and aiding educators' professional development, a major concern as more and more rides on student performance.

“We could hand the teachers the book and the curriculum and say ‘Have at it' with no support. Could they have done it? Probably. But would they be as effective? Probably not,” Christian said. “We all learn better together.”

According to recovery.gov, local police agencies and the Sheriff's Office added 16 new officers, and the College of Central Florida credited nine jobs to ARRA.

Local nonprofits reported at least 88 jobs, primarily at two local health clinics and the local group that serves Marion families enrolled in the federal Head Start education program.

The number could be higher because local nonprofits that collectively received millions from the federal government were not required to report job totals. In some cases, they rolled their numbers into those of the state agencies that passed the money along to them.

■ ■ ■

Although the Obama administration billed the infrastructure aspect of the ARRA package as the biggest investment in such projects since the interstate highway system, jobs in education, health care and law enforcement underscore the soft, often hidden nature of much of stimulus program.

For instance, ProPublica, a public interest journalism group, notes that Marion County received $24.1 million in the form of a one-time payment to local Social Security recipients.

Another $25 million went for housing loan guarantees for low- and moderate-income families, and Rasmussen College in Ocala received $11.2 million for its students with federal Pell Grants, ProPublica reported.

ARRA grants and contracts to Marion County companies seemed to have little, and almost tangential, effect on the community's economy, on the other hand.

For example, the largest stimulus-related payment to a for-profit company in Marion County went to Atheros Communications, a California-based company with operations in Ocala.

The company's work is ongoing, recovery.gov indicates, but so far at its peak the company created seven local jobs.

The federal website shows cases where Marion County companies supplied expertise or equipment for cleaning up environmental hazards in Georgia and Washington.

It's unclear how many jobs, if any, were needed in those initiatives because the contractors were subcontractors to larger firms that counted the total as part of their numbers, or were not required to report the number of jobs.

In other instances, even with construction jobs, the money flowed into Marion County but the profits went elsewhere.

Local subcontractors may have been used to expand Baseline Road and build the new Langley Health Services medical clinic in Silver Springs Shores — which combined totaled $32 million. But the contractors for those jobs were based in Tallahassee and Mexico Beach, Fla., respectively.

The owner of the Sutton Place apartment complex was awarded a $1.04 million tax credit to renovate the site.

Yet the company and the contractor identified on the city building permit for the project are both based in Michigan.

■ ■ ■

Green jobs were touted by the administration as an integral part of the ARRA, laying the path toward America's alternative energy future.

In December 2009, Biden declared that from the energy section of the stimulus package would emerge “a clean energy economy that will create a new generation of jobs, reduce dependence on oil and enhance national security.”

In February 2011, a report by the Blue Green Alliance and the Economic Policy Institute declared that the administration's spending on that industry had created or saved 1 million green jobs.

That success was primarily attributable to the “unprecedented green investments” in the ARRA, John Irons, the research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, said at the time.

Marion County accepted $2.4 million to build one of the largest solar panel fields in the state outside the Marion County jail. Recovery.gov data show the project, at its peak, created 13 jobs for local contractors.

Overall, however, the promise of an alternative energy future did not pan out locally.

Workforce Connection, the Ocala-based unemployment agency that serves Marion and two neighboring counties, received $3 million to run a green-job training program. The initiative seemed on target in 2009, with 344 enrollees, all but 11 of whom had earned some credentials.

But the program was abandoned, noted Laura Byrnes, Workforce's communications manager, after the economy remained stalled and the Legislature pulled the plug on a solar tax credit, eroding the expected growth in the industry.

Byrnes pointed out that for those reasons more than 30 companies that had promised to hire graduates of the green-energy training program went belly up by the time the grant was terminated in February 2011.

Still, Byrnes added, Workforce wound up reporting some success.

The agency placed 131 of those people in jobs, 55 of which were “pure green” jobs, she said.

■ ■ ■

The ultimate question is: Did it work?

Yes, would be the obvious answer for those who found or kept a job because of the ARRA.

In its analysis, ProPublica points out that unemployment in Marion County was 8.2 percent in July 2008, which was months after the recession started but still a couple of months away from the Wall Street-led collapse that further sunk the national economy.

In July 2010, when much of the ARRA money was already rolling in, the local jobless rate had jumped to 14.1 percent.

Last July, after most of the projects were wrapped up or close to completion, Marion's unemployment rate stood at 10.5 percent.

The last report, from January, pegged it at 8.9 percent.

On the national level, Garrett Jones and Daniel M. Rothschild, two economists at the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank at George Mason University in Virginia, concluded the stimulus provided more fizzle than sizzle.

Their September 2011 study of 85 ARRA recipients across the country concluded that employers snared more people who already had jobs than took on unemployed workers, and the firms that lost employees simply left the posts vacant.

“Job switching: yes; giving a company's current workers more to do: certainly. But hiring people from unemployment was more the exception than the rule,” they concluded of the ARRA.

Without it, the center determined, economic output would be lower and unemployment higher.

“The economy still faces a long and difficult climb out of the jobs hole created by the recent recession,” the report noted, but that hole would have been “much deeper” without the stimulus package.

Proponents of the stimulus could argue that it might have been more effective locally had Marion got a bigger cut. According to ProPublica's research, Marion County received $715 for each of its residents in ARRA funding, $475 less than the state per-capita amount and less than half of the $1,691 spent nationally for each American.

<p>Four years ago today, President Barack Obama scored one of his biggest policy victories, enacting the federal economic stimulus program that he had touted widely during his first campaign.</p><p>The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act promised to create or preserve 3.5 million jobs — 206,000 of them in Florida — during its first two years through a combination of tax breaks, government contracts and loans and direct entitlement payments.</p><p>Four years on, the $840 billion stimulus package remains very much with us.</p><p>Not all of the awarded money, either nationally or locally, has been spent, according to federal officials, and the recipients are still telling Washington how the funding is being utilized. The most recent report updates were recorded on Jan. 31.</p><p>Yet looking back over the past four years, at least within Marion County, it appears the stimulus program offered a mixed bag of economic success and perhaps didn't work quite the way people might have imagined.</p><p>The unemployment picture improved as the recovery act, or ARRA, money flowed in, but the program saved or created hundreds of jobs that were primarily in government, which taxpayers will be responsible for after the stimulus money is gone. And the private-sector jobs that did materialize over the past four years are now drying up along with the funding. </p><p>■ ■ ■</p><p>Given the gravity of the economic crisis at the time, and calls for funding “shovel-ready” projects, many likened Obama's program to the wide-scale public works efforts that President Franklin Roosevelt launched to combat the Great Depression.</p><p>That image was helped along by the administration itself.</p><p>Reporting on the progress of the recovery act on its first anniversary in February 2010, Vice President Joe Biden observed, “Jobs have been created thanks to tens of thousands of projects now under way nationwide. And the groundwork for the economy of the next century is being put in place as we invest in high speed rail, health technology, broadband, a smarter electrical grid, clean cars and batteries and renewable energy.”</p><p>Much of the $152.6 million that the ARRA poured into Marion County through grants and contracts went for such needs, according to recovery.gov, the government's official website that tracks stimulus spending.</p><p>Locals roads got paved. Water and sewer lines got installed. Sidewalks were poured. Buildings were constructed.</p><p>State environmental regulators even dug an underpass along County Road 475 to help equestrians, hikers and animals navigate the Marjorie Harris Carr Cross Florida Greenway.</p><p>The biggest local award — $27 million — went to the Florida Department of Transportation to four-lane nearly six miles of Baseline Road.</p><p>In all, at least $55 million of federal stimulus spending within Marion County went for infrastructure needs, a Star-Banner analysis of the recovery.gov data revealed.</p><p>The bulk of that money went for road projects, arriving mostly in 2009 and 2010 as scrambling local road builders were significantly cutting prices to find a job and laying people off if they couldn't.</p><p>“It drastically accelerated those projects” Greg Slay, executive director of the Ocala-Marion County Transportation Organization, said of the nearly two dozen projects that took off with stimulus funds.</p><p>“We did a good job putting together a list of projects so when (the Department of Transportation) called, we could hand them a stack of projects. There are definitely projects that to this day probably still wouldn't be done” were it not for that money.</p><p>But therein lies the conundrum of much of the stimulus spending.</p><p>Topping the list of the Obama administration's talking points from February 2009 was the argument that 90 percent of the projected 3.5 million jobs nationwide would be created in the private sector.</p><p>Undoubtedly, the ARRA money breathed life into local government projects that might have been delayed for a considerable amount of time, if they got done at all, as the recession deepened and public budgets were pared.</p><p>In turn, dozens of construction workers found work — albeit temporary, since those projects are now mostly completed.</p><p>But it was government agencies and nonprofits that posted many of the employment gains.</p><p>■ ■ ■</p><p>Under the ARRA, a “job” is not necessarily a job, as commonly understood.</p><p>Federal guidelines told recipients to calculate the employment generated by the money according to a formula documenting the “full-time equivalent,” or FTE, of a job.</p><p>The totals were reported quarterly and based on workers amassing 520 hours in a three-month span. Thus, as federal auditors saw it, one FTE was created whether one worker put in that much time over three months or 10 workers posted 52 hours each.</p><p>In the summer of 2010, for example, when the city of Ocala made street improvements downtown at Broadway Street and Southwest First Avenue, the contractor reported using 123 people on the project, recovery.gov records indicate.</p><p>Collectively those people worked 5,772 hours. Under the government's formula, that equated to about 11 “jobs.”</p><p>Typically, according to the reports, the jobs total rises slowly, peaks and then tapers off.</p><p>Ed Pound, spokesman for the federal board that oversees the stimulus projects, described the jobs numbers, although self-reported by recipients or contractors, as “high quality.” He added that measures were taken to ensure they were not fudged.</p><p>Using the numbers reported at the peak of those projects, the $55 million devoted to infrastructure needs created about 275 jobs.</p><p>In comparison, an equivalent amount of money helped preserve and spawn nearly four times that many jobs in education.</p><p>Marion County Public Schools officials say the Obama administration's plan saved 884 jobs and created 130 others, new hires primarily made to comply with recent state and federal education requirements.</p><p>School district spokesman Kevin Christian said the $54 million in ARRA funding reduced by half the $104 million budget cut the district was prepared to make.</p><p>Without that, the district — the single biggest recipient of ARRA funding in Marion County — would have eliminated jobs primarily for teachers' support personnel who play an integral part in implementing the curriculum and aiding educators' professional development, a major concern as more and more rides on student performance.</p><p>“We could hand the teachers the book and the curriculum and say 'Have at it' with no support. Could they have done it? Probably. But would they be as effective? Probably not,” Christian said. “We all learn better together.”</p><p>According to recovery.gov, local police agencies and the Sheriff's Office added 16 new officers, and the College of Central Florida credited nine jobs to ARRA.</p><p>Local nonprofits reported at least 88 jobs, primarily at two local health clinics and the local group that serves Marion families enrolled in the federal Head Start education program.</p><p>The number could be higher because local nonprofits that collectively received millions from the federal government were not required to report job totals. In some cases, they rolled their numbers into those of the state agencies that passed the money along to them.</p><p>■ ■ ■</p><p>Although the Obama administration billed the infrastructure aspect of the ARRA package as the biggest investment in such projects since the interstate highway system, jobs in education, health care and law enforcement underscore the soft, often hidden nature of much of stimulus program.</p><p>For instance, ProPublica, a public interest journalism group, notes that Marion County received $24.1 million in the form of a one-time payment to local Social Security recipients.</p><p>Another $25 million went for housing loan guarantees for low- and moderate-income families, and Rasmussen College in Ocala received $11.2 million for its students with federal Pell Grants, ProPublica reported.</p><p>ARRA grants and contracts to Marion County companies seemed to have little, and almost tangential, effect on the community's economy, on the other hand.</p><p>For example, the largest stimulus-related payment to a for-profit company in Marion County went to Atheros Communications, a California-based company with operations in Ocala.</p><p>The company's work is ongoing, recovery.gov indicates, but so far at its peak the company created seven local jobs.</p><p>The federal website shows cases where Marion County companies supplied expertise or equipment for cleaning up environmental hazards in Georgia and Washington.</p><p>It's unclear how many jobs, if any, were needed in those initiatives because the contractors were subcontractors to larger firms that counted the total as part of their numbers, or were not required to report the number of jobs.</p><p>In other instances, even with construction jobs, the money flowed into Marion County but the profits went elsewhere.</p><p>Local subcontractors may have been used to expand Baseline Road and build the new Langley Health Services medical clinic in Silver Springs Shores — which combined totaled $32 million. But the contractors for those jobs were based in Tallahassee and Mexico Beach, Fla., respectively.</p><p>The owner of the Sutton Place apartment complex was awarded a $1.04 million tax credit to renovate the site.</p><p>Yet the company and the contractor identified on the city building permit for the project are both based in Michigan.</p><p>■ ■ ■</p><p>Green jobs were touted by the administration as an integral part of the ARRA, laying the path toward America's alternative energy future.</p><p>In December 2009, Biden declared that from the energy section of the stimulus package would emerge “a clean energy economy that will create a new generation of jobs, reduce dependence on oil and enhance national security.”</p><p>In February 2011, a report by the Blue Green Alliance and the Economic Policy Institute declared that the administration's spending on that industry had created or saved 1 million green jobs.</p><p>That success was primarily attributable to the “unprecedented green investments” in the ARRA, John Irons, the research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, said at the time.</p><p>Marion County accepted $2.4 million to build one of the largest solar panel fields in the state outside the Marion County jail. Recovery.gov data show the project, at its peak, created 13 jobs for local contractors.</p><p>Overall, however, the promise of an alternative energy future did not pan out locally.</p><p>Workforce Connection, the Ocala-based unemployment agency that serves Marion and two neighboring counties, received $3 million to run a green-job training program. The initiative seemed on target in 2009, with 344 enrollees, all but 11 of whom had earned some credentials.</p><p>But the program was abandoned, noted Laura Byrnes, Workforce's communications manager, after the economy remained stalled and the Legislature pulled the plug on a solar tax credit, eroding the expected growth in the industry.</p><p>Byrnes pointed out that for those reasons more than 30 companies that had promised to hire graduates of the green-energy training program went belly up by the time the grant was terminated in February 2011.</p><p>Still, Byrnes added, Workforce wound up reporting some success.</p><p>The agency placed 131 of those people in jobs, 55 of which were “pure green” jobs, she said.</p><p>■ ■ ■</p><p>The ultimate question is: Did it work?</p><p>Yes, would be the obvious answer for those who found or kept a job because of the ARRA.</p><p>In its analysis, ProPublica points out that unemployment in Marion County was 8.2 percent in July 2008, which was months after the recession started but still a couple of months away from the Wall Street-led collapse that further sunk the national economy.</p><p>In July 2010, when much of the ARRA money was already rolling in, the local jobless rate had jumped to 14.1 percent.</p><p>Last July, after most of the projects were wrapped up or close to completion, Marion's unemployment rate stood at 10.5 percent.</p><p>The last report, from January, pegged it at 8.9 percent.</p><p>On the national level, Garrett Jones and Daniel M. Rothschild, two economists at the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank at George Mason University in Virginia, concluded the stimulus provided more fizzle than sizzle.</p><p>Their September 2011 study of 85 ARRA recipients across the country concluded that employers snared more people who already had jobs than took on unemployed workers, and the firms that lost employees simply left the posts vacant.</p><p>“Job switching: yes; giving a company's current workers more to do: certainly. But hiring people from unemployment was more the exception than the rule,” they concluded of the ARRA.</p><p>Yet last week, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal group, cited Congressional Budget Office data that showed the ARRA's positive impact.</p><p>Without it, the center determined, economic output would be lower and unemployment higher.</p><p>“The economy still faces a long and difficult climb out of the jobs hole created by the recent recession,” the report noted, but that hole would have been “much deeper” without the stimulus package.</p><p>Proponents of the stimulus could argue that it might have been more effective locally had Marion got a bigger cut. According to ProPublica's research, Marion County received $715 for each of its residents in ARRA funding, $475 less than the state per-capita amount and less than half of the $1,691 spent nationally for each American.</p><p><i>Contact Bill Thompson at 867-4117 or at bill.thompson@starbanner.com.</i></p>